Sharon Olds | Critical Review by Clair Wills

SOURCE: "The Body as Matter," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4711, July 16, 1993, p. 25.

In the following review, Wills praises Olds's unsentimental and honest depiction of emotionally laden topics and social taboos in The Father.

Some years ago, Sharon Olds's father died of throat cancer; this book comprises a sequence of poems charting the death of the body, and exploring the emotions and physical sensations experienced by the daughter in the face of the loss of an unloving father. With an easy lyricism, Olds recounts the gradual achievement of a kind of closeness, based not so much on mutual understanding as on an acceptance of the physical, of the body as matter. In "The Lifting" her father draws his nightshirt up to his neck, forcing her to look at his body when she would have turned away. The gown